COVID-19: This Is By Far the Hardest Hit State Now

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 12, 9:44AM EST · Published Jan 12, 7:59AM EST

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COVID-19: This Is By Far the Hardest Hit State Now — © Sharon Chischilly / Getty Images News via Getty Images

The spread of COVID-19 confirmed cases and deaths across America has become more alarming by the day. Cases total 22,732,280 and have started to rise by over 200,000 most days. Deaths stand at 378,777 and almost certainly will reach 400,000 at the end of the month. An astonishing quarter of the world’s confirmed cases are in the United States. American hospital intensive care units have filled to over 100% in many places. The national number of hospitalizations reached over 125,000 almost a week ago, a record, and continue to rise.

COVID-19’s spread gets measured in several traditional ways. The numbers of cases and deaths by state and by county are released to the public every day. Another measure is confirmed cases over the past seven days. That measures the intensity of the spread of the disease in a specific area. Among the states, the worst based on this statistic by a wide margin is Arizona, which was hit hard at midyear when the disease spread west and south from the first waves of the disease that were in the northeast and Midwest, particularly in the New York City area. COVID-19 has returned with a vengeance to the nation’s 14th largest state by its population at 7,421,401.

The confirmed case count per 100,000 people over the past seven days in Arizona is 130. This is much higher than in the next states. These are California and Rhode Island at 107. At the far end of the spectrum, Hawaii’s figure is 14.

Arizona’s problem has been driven to a large extent by its largest county, Maricopa, which is home to Phoenix. Confirmed cases per 100,000 on a seven-day average in the county are 135. The county has about 60% of the state’s population.
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According to John’s Hopkins, Maricopa County has the third-highest number of cases among all counties at 382,409. That places it behind Los Angeles County at 920,177 and Cook County, home to Chicago, at 417,790.

Maricopa County ranks fifth in deaths at 5,818. Ahead of it, Los Angeles County has 12,250. Cook County has 8,760. Kings County and Queens County, which are part of New York City, have 7,895 and 7,652, respectively. Maricopa is trailed in sixth place by Bronx County, another part of New York City, which has 5,195 deaths.

Arizona can hope that it falls from the top of the list of cases per 100,000. So far, every state at the top of the list has. The primary worry as time passes is that it does not stay near the top of the list for very long.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.